BY PHILIP FITZPATRICK

With a comment by John Fowke

THERE ARE THREE levels of government in Papua New Guinea; national, provincial and local.  The provinces are not separate states but branches of the national government, with the governors having seats in the national parliament.

Each province is divided into districts and each district into local level government (LLG) areas.  The LLGs are divided into wards with councillors each representing several villages.

The district boundaries correspond to open electoral boundaries, so that each district has a representative in the national parliament.  Until 2006 the presidents of the LLGs also had seats in the provincial assemblies.

The three tiers of government were ratified under the Provincial and Local Level Governments Act of 1995.  Under that Act, LLGs are supposed to be the focal points for much of the basic service delivery for Mr and Mrs Grassroots, including electricity and water supply.

The National Government has an ambitious plan to directly fund the districts under its District Support Improvement Plan. Unfortunately many districts lack the capacity to absorb these funds and to implement development programs. 

The District Administrators (DAs), their districts are aligned with the open electorates, are usually politicised, resulting in a high turnover of staff at senior level. 

There is also a lack of sufficiently trained personnel in the districts, particularly in the areas of program management, procurement, monitoring and evaluation.  At the moment the most politically compliant sit in these jobs rather than the most qualified.

Even though the funding is directed to the district, the largesse has to be seen to have come from the efforts of the local member, i.e., the bikman syndrome at work.  Coupled with this is the nexus between the local member and the District Administrator; the latter is dependent, in most cases, on the former for his job.

Therefore, if you have a corrupt local member, you are more than likely to have a corrupt and colluding DA; together they can divert district funds where they please.

My experience from Western, Gulf and Central Provinces is that the local member tells the DA what to do; if you want to find the DA find out where the local member is; the DA will be trotting two steps behind.

DAs, in turn, lord it over the LLG presidents and councillors. So if someone wants the school in their village fixed, they have to kowtow to the local member, who, more than likely, has an entirely different agenda.

If as John Fowke suggests, you set up a nexus between the local member and the LLG for funding, you might cut out the middleman (the District Administrator) but the net result might be the same, with the avenues for corruption still there.

One could also incorrectly assume that the LLGs, because they are closer to Mr and Mrs Grassroots, might have their interests at heart. My experience is that there are some very ambitious LLG presidents and councillors aspiring to become local members one day and they can be as corrupt as anyone else.

There are notable exceptions of course.  There are, I think, many, many more good men and women in Papua New Guinea than bad.  Unfortunately the latter are currently in the ascendancy and they have some very good teachers in the national capital.

The policy is also good.  What is crook is the delivery.  The provincial governors weren’t very happy about the District Support Improvement Plan; they saw it as a money-grab by the local members. 

And Mr and Mrs Grassroots are blithely unaware of the plan.  If you take out the influence of the local member, the ructions will be even louder; but that is precisely what needs to happen.

The funds need to go directly to either the district administration or, as John Fowke suggests, the LLG administrations, with no sticky political fingers, from whatever level, within cooee. 

The LLGs also need their seats back on the provincial assemblies because that is the door through which the money enters; either that or the door needs to be slammed shut and the focus entirely shifted to the districts.

I’m inclined to favour funding going to the districts.  You can’t expect the national government, except in a scattergun sense, to know which schools need a new roof or which roads need grading but the district administration, if it is honest and in touch, should be able to prioritise and equitably distribute needed funds.

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JOHN FOWKE COMMENTS:

"If you take out the influence of the local member the ructions will be even louder; but that is precisely what needs to happen"

I have laboured for long to show that PNG is a crooked hegemony, and not a democracy at all, because the people are not accepting nor aware of the nature and role of political parties.

PNG should never have been allowed to grow its own adversarial party system as per Westminster.

The old system of appointed district-level representation in the District Advisory Counsils, in turn sending representatives to the appointed Legislative Council, which fell naturally into the PNG imagination and socio-political ethos, should have been democratised by statute and allowed to continue - with the involvement of the Local Level Governments as the basic electoral convenor-forum and basic service-provision overseer.

In the 1960s, there was a rather childish fear around generated by the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya. Such tribal rebellion was the theme of Ian Downs' novel The Stolen Land written in 1967.

This occupied the minds of the few thinkers at the head of the Australian Administration, to the exclusion of experience and observation. The only senior voice of sense came from the late David Fenbury.

I have repeated this theme many times in PNG Attitude, and in all four of the PNG papers:  Post-Courier,  National, Wantok and Sunday Observer.

PNG's woes may to a major extent be laid at the door, not of Australian policy - for the party system grew from within the matrix of the House of Assembly - but are the result of Australian blindness and lack of imagination in allowing a theoretically class-based system of representation to arise in a classless society.

This gave birth to PNG’s first social class - the exploitative, usually manipulative and often corrupt MPs operating in a party system.

Granted that all the negative aspects of a multi-tribal society are ipso facto embodied in the LLG/District/MP system, as Phil points out.

But the people of PNG are entirely voiceless in the affairs both of their own locality and of the State - simply because no-one has ever shown them a naturally and culturally meaningful, adoptable way of forming themselves into a national electorate and thus into a Nation, with all that this implies.